August 3, 2010

Celebrating 25 Years of SMS!

SMS Expert, Sheri Wells, talks about how text messaging got started, went viral, and took the mobile industry by surprise.

It's been 25 years since the standardization of SMS (Short Message Service) was developed in 1985 by a collaborated effort between Germany and France. SMS was created by Friedhelm Hillebrand, Bernard Ghillebaert, and Oculy Silaban with the innovation behind it being short. SMS messages, commonly called text messages, are 160 characters in length. The organizations that created the standards made SMS technology freely available to the whole world. After 25 years, mobile subscribers have adopted text messaging as the new way to communicate because it's fast, easy and works on all cell phones.

The first text message ("Happy Christmas") was sent in on December 3, 1992 over the Vodafone GSM network in the United Kingdom from Neil Papworth of Sema Group from an R&D lab using a personal computer to Richard Jarvis of Vodafone.